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Development of executive cognitive functions

Book - Dissertation

Executive cognitive functions are a set of cognitive skills that form the basic building blocks for more complex cognitive functions such as planning or monitoring of goal-directed behavior. All executive cognitive functions rely on the prefrontal cortex. They develop relatively late in childhood and are among the first functions to show age-related decline in older adulthood. Furthermore, they are susceptible to training or expertise. In this dissertation, we assessed effects of development, comprising childhood development, aging and expertise, on three specific executive cognitive functions, namely visuospatial discrimination, verbal memory and cognitive control. In Chapter 2, the effects of childhood development and music training on visuospatial discrimination and verbal memory were examined. Musically trained children showed superior visuospatial discrimination and verbal memory in comparison to their untrained peers. In adults, music training only benefited delayed verbal memory. These findings suggested that in children, visuospatial discrimination and verbal memory are boosted by music training. In adults, where frontal lobe development and executive functions are fully developed, music training might have a more modest impact. In Chapter 3, we assessed the effect of childhood development on inhibition, which is a crucial aspect of cognitive control. Proactive and reactive cognitive control were examined using flanker and number comparison tasks with a proportion congruency manipulation. Results indicated that children from age seven on, can already use proactive and reactive control strategies depending on the level of conflict. Our results suggested that in the flanker task, the balance between the two control strategies is still developing across childhood. In the number comparison task, which is a daily-life task that is more familiar to the children, all age groups showed a comparable use of control strategies. In Chapter 4, the effects of aging on task shifting and dual tasking, as aspects of cognitive control, were examined. Young and older adults performed a low-level timing task, concurrently with a cognitive task that required task shifting. Results showed that task shifting shows age-related decline. The timing task was only affected by concurrent task shifting in older adults. These results showed that older adults can possibly compensate for age-related declines in cognitive-motor dual tasking, but this is no longer possible when task demands become too high. Our findings indicate that expertise can benefit executive cognitive functions in children. Furthermore, task familiarity seems to play an important role, perhaps limiting the beneficial effects of expertise (as we only found modest effects of music training on visuospatial and verbal tasks in adults) and diminishing developmental effects (as young children used cognitive control strategies as effective as adults in a familiar number comparison task). Lastly, we found effects of aging mainly under high cognitive task demands (i.e. task switching in a dual-task setting), which suggests that older adults compensate for age-related decline by investing more resources or cognitive effort when possible. Our findings show that expertise, task familiarity and task demands are crucial aspects for research targeting the development of executive cognitive functions.
Publication year:2022
Accessibility:Open